Ubuntu 9.10, codenamed Karmic Koala, was officially released last month. In …

Ubuntu 9.10, codenamed Karmic Koala, climbed down from the tree last month with new features and updated software. For five years and eleven releases, the Ubuntu Linux distribution has delivered a capable desktop operating system built largely on open source software. The new version is another important step forward for Ubuntu and its corporate backer Canonical.

The new version offers a user experience that is incrementally better than its predecessors, but there is still a lot of room for improvement. Some of the new software introduced in Ubuntu 9.10 feels incomplete and will need a lot more work before it can really shine. This review will take a close look at some of the most significant new features, such as Canonical's Ubuntu One service and the new Software Center application management tool. We will also examine some of the upstream software from GNOME 2.28 that plays a role in defining key parts of the user experience in Ubuntu 9.10 and give you some technical insight into various architectural components of distro, such as Ubuntu's unique CouchDB configuration.

Installation

Ubuntu is typically installed from a bootable Live CD environment. The graphical installer, which is called Ubiquity, includes built-in partitioning tools and allows users to configure some basic system settings. The installer is designed with a strong emphasis on simplicity and ease of use.

Ubiquity got an aesthetic overhaul for the Karmic release. During the installation process, it will now display a slide show that highlights some of the key features and important applications that are included in Ubuntu. The information will help introduce new users to the platform. In previous versions, the installer only showed a progress bar.

The Ubiquity slideshow is a nice improvement that adds a little bit of extra elegance to installation. The messages are concise and the artwork is well done. Similar features have existed in other operating systems and Linux distributions for practically as long as graphical installers have existed, but it's nice to see Ubuntu's take on the concept.

The material is targeted at new users, so it obviously doesn't say much that will interest Ubuntu enthusiasts. Fortunately, the Live CD includes the GNOME games collection for those of us who would rather indulge in an exhilarating game of Solitaire during the installation. The following images show several screens from the installer slideshow:

And yet, after all these years and bug reports to boot, Ubuntu still doesn't do obvious things that someone migrating from Windows would clearly expect, like having it recognize Windows' variety of URL shortcut files and open them in the default browser. That particular bug, in fact, got attention from a developer who declared it wasn't worthy of "papercut" status and being resolved in the distribution proper, in spite of the fact that 90% of the solution had already been cobbled together by people who had been affected by it.

I'm sorry, Mister Developer, but having hundreds of .URL files that immediately become useless after I migrate to Ubuntu is NOT a mere papercut, that's a puncture wound that won't heal.

And let me break the combo of negative comments by saying that I've been running Karmic since the day it came out, and have had no significant issues. Maybe a few little problems here and there, but nothing that can't be expected from a just-released system.

Also:

quote:

Fortunately, the GNOME release team has determined that it needs more time and has pushed the 3.0 transition back to late 2010. We could potentially see it in Ubuntu 10.04, the release that will follow after Lucid.

Thanks for putting in the bit about bugs. I think after every release of Ubuntu there are people saying its much more unstable than the last with more bugs. Relying on Forum Polls is very bad journalism, and its unfortunate that newspapers like The Telegraph used them. In their defence The Telegraph is a non-tech broadsheet. But shame on Linux Magazine and El Reg...!

At work we haven't hit any problems with our test group, and will probably start rolling this out to developers next week.

Stopped reading after the part about using CouchDB as a configuration backend.

While CouchDB is a great piece of software, I just can't see the necessity of using a concurrent, revisioning, schema free, distributed, multi-user database system JUST TO STORE PREFERENCES OF A SINGLE USER... It increases dependencies, it increases system complexity, and (from an idealistic point-of-view) violates the Unix principle of "KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid" and "Do one thing and do it right" when used this way.

Now, I often wish there was one single way to configure Unix software and often find myself baffled when confronted with some of the more unusual (bind, anyone?) configuration files that implement half a scripting language (looking at you, lighttpd). But I just don't think there will be any change soon, if ever.

And if such a change should occur, I doubt it will be a database system such as CouchDB. For one, it's way too "internety" and for another it's not written in C. As sad as that is, basic system software and services not written in C (or bad C++) just won't make it very far. Especially if the software in question is written in a interpreted language.

I decided to keep as far away from KDE 4.x as I can for the same reason. I just don't get why Akonadi requires a fscking MySQL server (last time I tried Kubuntu 8.10 it did)? Seems a bit overkill, just to store a few contacts.

I really don't understand why people keep describing this release as "buggy". I upgraded my desktop and Eee-1000 netbook to 9.10 3 weeks ago, and, overall, I found Karmic to be a nice incremental release. Definitely less problematic than Jaunty, and much faster and more functional too.

Things I really liked include:* New, much faster UXA driver for Intel graphics chips. Finally, my Eee can sport a useable 3D desktop.* The new Human theme. Cool icons, even cooler tray icons, and, overall, much sleeker and useable.* Empathy. Much more elegant and easier to use than Pidgin. (I really can't comment on the crashes related to voice and video messaging, since I don't use those features.)* The removal of superfluous menu and button icons. This is a godsend for netbook users, and you can always revent to the old behaviour on desktop machines.* The new bug reporting tool.* The new sound options dialogue.

The only serious bug I ran into has to do with the Eee-1000 not resuming from hibernation successfully from time to time. However, since I haven't found any relevant bug reports on Lunchpad, I suspect that this may have something to do with my partitioning (I didn't re-format the SSD, opting for the upgrade path instead.) I also had a couple of crashes of Seahorse and One components during shutdown. These have not caused me any problems, and have already been acknowledged and are being triaged.

In conclusion, I have been using Ubuntu exclusively for the last year or so, and I'm very happy with it. Every release is definitely better than the previous one, and it offers a commerce- and malware-free computing environment of the kind Windows and Mac users can only dream of. (Hopefully, Canonical will be wise enough not to spoil this by misusing their new Ubuntu One and Software Centre services.)

And we should all bear in mind that Ubuntu gets a new release every 6 months. I would like to see Microsoft or Apple doing that and still have a working product.

Originally posted by mhungry:Tried it, abandoned it immediately. WAY too buggy. The notification system in particular was a huge deal breaker.

Agreed. Ubuntu releases have been getting progressively worse IMO. I upgraded from Jaunty and was met with a whole bunch of stuff that broke... I got everything working eventually, but decided I'd had enough and jumped ship to openSUSE the day 11.2 was released.

openSUSE's KDE4 implementation is sweet and it runs rings around Kubuntu.

I'm running KK it on my desktop and netbook, and loving it for the most part so far...

Except:

- hate hate HATE the new UNR desktop. It burys all my folders and SD/USB storage by an extra click (and maybe a scroll). And--aesthetically annoying--the entire icon window scrolls "under" some weird arbitrary margin instead of scrolling the icons within the nicely round-edged space. Also, the icon spacing is sloppy. Take a page from W7 and space those suckers evenly, no matter the window size.

- GRUB2 means I need to do some command line acrobatics to edit my list. There's no good reason this should be made harder, especially since, as long as I've used Linux, every dual-booting newbie will have to resurrect GRUB after a Windows install kills it. Don't give us stuff like this w/o a GUI. It's fine for Arch, but not Ubuntu.

- F***ing Metacity still can't AA a f***ing rounded corner!? Time to DTMFA. I know this isn't Ubuntu's fault, but for the love of God...

Upgraded from 9.04 and all in all satisfied with this release. From my point of view there wasn't as big an improvement as when I jumped to 9.04, but that's also because I don't care about Ubuntu One, CouchDB, or Software center. Still, I can't understand why people are so frustrated with 9.10.

To be complete, i had only one problem that made the release looks bad : -I had a problem with flash, i couldn't reinstall it from the software center, and had to use synaptic to make it work.

2 things I didn't like :- The Pidgin's features Empathy is (for now) lacking are a deal breaker for me so I didn't try it at all and stuck with Pidgin (I have no mic, no webcam, and no use for audio/video chat).- The new opening screen with his brown color...They said they wanted to get rid of the orange and so they choose yet again an ugly color. It's too bad because the "spotlights" are nice, and on the page dedicated to the change of this screen, several users proposed others screens, some using the same concept, but with different, much nicer colors. So even though I admit the new screen is "quite good", I always think it's a missed opportunity. Sure you can theme it, but that screen is still the first thing people will see when they discover Ubuntu.

But these 2 are all nitpicks and again I don't understand all the hate.

I've been trying for 3 years now to make the jump to Linux. When my HTPC was up for renewal 3 weeks back, I went with the Asrock 330 specifically because it didn't have Windows on it and I felt I would be obliged to make the dive with Linux.The base system worked OK but (small) problems immediately surfaced:- VNC doesn't work with Compiz + Nvidia drivers; no screen refresh. I tried the No Machine solution but that didn't really do what I wanted as it spawned parallel sessions for a given user (not just remote screen view).- Flash 10.0 performance was appalling (I know they just released 10.1 which should be better but too late now).- the computer would not wake from sleep when I clicked the USB mouse. I saw some instructions which were at least a page long to fix that- the SMB performance to a Mac running leopard was only 50% of network capacity.- the Gnome VPN client didn't work. It always said no connection found.- Sadly the performance under wine of Zattoo (TV program) was appalling (think slideshow).- The HDMI 5.1 audio wasn't working-iTunes 9.x doesn't work (the store at least).- no Mozy like backup solution available for Linux (in true unlimited sense, I saw a few with 50gb or 100gb, don't like to count).

I *really* wanted this to work. But all of these little headaches put together were just too much for me, I had to order a copy of W7 and everything works fine now. I feel vindicated and horrible for having given up but I figured that £80 for the W7 licence was worth less than my my precious free time.

I hope to try again in the future, if only to have this little "victory" over linux. I don't want to stay defeated. Maybe Mandriva or Fedora will work better.

I started with the negative comments, let me follow up with the positive.

Karmic hibernates better than W7 and XP. It detects my gamepads and wifi (W7 does'nt) and plays emulators better than W7 but I havent found all the emulators I used for XP on it yet.

I only really play Team Fortress 2 and it was a matter of installing Wine and doubleclicking the steam installation msi to install. A couple of restarts and a steam download later I was in TF2 but I had to Google for TF2 startup options for the framerate to be acceptable (DX 8.1 and force OpenGL). Windows 7 on the other hand still has problems with loosing mouse control when TF2 looses fullscreen/focus and weird widescreen glitches. This is the first time I get WINE to work and I dont even have the slightest bit of competency in this field. This was smooth and painless.

All in all it makes for a good change from W7 but not XP.

The problems I have had with Karmic have been with a homeserver (GRUB2) and other ppls computers (hardware detection and lack of knowhow/mindshare).

Saying Ubuntu 9.10 is a broken and/or release is being unreasonable. I find the issues concerning Ubuntu are more like issues of GNU/Linux in general or the desktop environment used.

My problem with Ubuntu is the direction the user interface is going towards. (which is more of a Gnome issue). I do think that eliminating excessive amounts of options and configurations screens does improve the user experience. The developers should not expect from the basic user to configure everything before anything works. However, I think Gnome started to get overboard with this simplification issue.

e.g. This update robbed me the ability to control the volume levels of the speakers in my 7.1 setup individually. And yes I know you can get that ability back by installing alsamixer(which tries to detect my sound hardware automatically and fails miserably but that's another issue) but the question is why should I have to? Keep in mind that with the increase of hi def video content desktop computers started to have 5.1 or other surround setups more and more every day. This kind of control was very easy in the pre Gnome 2.26 interface.

Every bit of functionality you remove from the gui means the user has to utilize the command prompt to solve his problems. Which is unacceptable (at least for Ubuntu)since the point of a gui is exactly the opposite.

The same is true for the message indicator. Yes it is subtle... but do we need subtlety at the expense of functionality?

A topic untouched by this review was the change of IM status icons in the upper bar. In 9.04 most user based actions were done with a menu on the right side of the screen. When an IM client was open (like Pidgin or Empathy) this menu would also display status settings. It was possible to switch from Available to Away to Busy using this menu only.

Now these items are buried in an expanding menu and the icons have changed to match the new understated theme of Karmic Koala. Instead of clear, color and shape coded status icons of the past (which btw are used by Empathy too) now we have greyish icons which look similar to each other.

The whole idea of having a notifier is to free you from the need to check your IM/Mail or similar client. Doesn't this really defeat the entire purpose?

My god! It's full of brown! Clearly anyone who would chose this colour scheme as a default for an OS should never be allowed to hold any position of authority, or even give an opinion on anything related to aesthetics.

To be honest, i was sceptical at first.But Karmic is ok. And all ubuntu releases has problems, but still its the best alternative if you dont have a huge wallet.So the question is buggy release compared to what?Problems with different file-formats?Many times there are solutions if you look closely enough.

Ryan,Thanks for the in-depth review. Very timely. I'm currently shopping for a replacement. I may even be on Dapper. Hardware is old as well.Is there any one place to go for comparisons of OS life-cycle support (i.e. Ubuntu LTS, OPENSUSE, ..)?Bob

Originally posted by Joel_B:Interesting review. I will probably read it further later.

Thanks for putting in the bit about bugs. I think after every release of Ubuntu there are people saying its much more unstable than the last with more bugs. Relying on Forum Polls is very bad journalism, and its unfortunate that newspapers like The Telegraph used them. In their defence The Telegraph is a non-tech broadsheet. But shame on Linux Magazine and El Reg...!

Like you, I can just about forgive the Torygraph. I've never bothered with Linux Magazine to be honest. The Register on he other hand. We'll it's just shit! They used to be the Private Eye (and that's a pile of wank now!) of IT reporting, now they are closer to the Sun or worse still, the Star!!! That may not make sense to the non-UK readership, so I'll apologise! Suffice to say they aren't very good! For me The Register's mistake was trying to be more like ZDnet.com, you know, flame and link bait style "articles". No content or insight and poorly written (much like the modern Private Eye!).

The review here is excellent, as always. Just really long and as someone that has ADD, it's hard work! Personally, I've had next to no problems with Ubuntu 9.10, except for Broadcom wireless drivers, which is par for the course I guess! I've got to say that the Ubuntu community is fantastic too, very few "search the forums n00b" or "Google it n00b", and for that alone they deserve any success that they have.

I sometimes wish companies like Canonical would quit releasing precompiled binaries altogether, and only distribute their products as source code. I think this would solve a ton of the "problems" related to Ubuntu and other Linux distributions.

I've installed 9.10 on my laptop and I'm pretty happy with the upgrade. Stylus works now, which is nice. Touch screen semi-works, but needs to be configured.

A couple of responses to the review:

I've been slightly irriated by Ubuntu's "everything's gratis" marketing pitch for a while now. Free means freedom and you should be willing to pay for it. I believe in all that and I've thought that it should be easy to buy software via synaptic (or whatever) for a while. Having a proprietary section is great, but they should be giving people the chance to simply sell their free software at the point of installation. Quite a lot of apps encourage you to donate through paypal on the project's website. Why not extend this onto a user's desktop?

Moving on to the notifaction area, this irritates me more than anything in recent releases. I remember when you used to be notified of some issue or other by an icon that, like a good butler, would politely stand-by in the notification tray awaiting your attention. Now, the update manager barges infront of anything you're doing like an angry matron and won't fuck off until you install your security updates like a good little boy. The network manager flashes a banner every time I connect to or disconnect from the lan. What for? I know the network's connected; that's what the icon's for.

It was this kind of UI crap that caused me to move away from Win XP in the first place. In some regards, Linux UIs have improved a lot since the Gnome 2.4 days but ultimately I think they may have moved away from what were probably better design principles. I want a butler, not a nanny.

I'm sorry, a product filled with problems cannot be considered an incremental improvement.

An incremental improvement would have been equal to the previous release state with slight improvements. That is not the case here.

The only incremental improvement is the Intel video driver maturing a little, otherwise it is ten steps backwards in the realm of stability and maturity. Your review only proves this further, so feel free to stop apologizing and making excuses for the utter garbage that is 9.10.

Originally posted by Fewt:I'm sorry, a product filled with problems cannot be considered an incremental improvement.

An incremental improvement would have been equal to the previous release state with slight improvements. That is not the case here.

The only incremental improvement is the Intel video driver maturing a little, otherwise it is ten steps backwards in the realm of stability and maturity. Your review only proves this further, so feel free to stop apologizing and making excuses for the utter garbage that is 9.10.

Thanks.

Thanks for helping demonstrate my point. My advice to you? Switch to Gentoo. If you can't get it working, go home, and keep using Windows.

Quite frankly, no Linux distribution is ever going to appear anything other than "utter garbage" to most people until it's sold for >$99, and under a completely different name so people won't know it's really Linux, by a multi-billion dollar company that can back it up by a huge marketing campaign and televised advertisements that target some niche market with entirely too much money. Code quality and usability really have absolutely nothing to do with it.

Thanks for helping demonstrate my point. My advice to you? Switch to Gentoo. If you can't get it working, go home, and keep using Windows.

Quite frankly, no Linux distribution is ever going to appear anything other than "utter garbage" to most people until it's sold for >$99, and under a completely different name so people won't know it's really Linux, by a multi-billion dollar company that can back it up by a huge marketing campaign and televised advertisements that target some niche market with entirely too much money. Code quality and usability really have absolutely nothing to do with it.

I'm sorry, but who are you? I used to run Gentoo, not a fan. Mark Shuttleworth is targetting consumers with this OS, in order to do that Canonical cannot continue to release immature unstable product no matter how "free" it is.

[...]The base system worked OK but (small) problems immediately surfaced:[...]- no Mozy like backup solution available for Linux (in true unlimited sense, I saw a few with 50gb or 100gb, don't like to count).

@tutis:

Have you looked at SpiderOak backup? Just like Mozy, you pay for the amount of storage (MozyPro is $.50/GB/mo; SpiderOak is $10/100GB/mo -- much cheaper for large quantities). Also, SpiderOak is cross-platform, and does file sync and web access as well as backup. In fact, I think of it as a file sync tool that just so happens to provide secure backup.

One thing I haven't understood with the notifications (like the one that comes up when you disable LAN or when Rhythmbox starts downloading a new podcast) is that you can't close it. When I move the pointer over it, it becomes fuzzy. Fair enough, but I can't get it way. Why not? I usually like to remove notifications like that after I have read them.

Another (esthetic) bug is that Nautilus can't change the icon for links (not emblems but the icons). I like to have a harddrive icon for the links to the mountpoints of my drives, but I can't anymore.

I upgraded two old machines with no trouble but my desktop would not correctly boot the livecd past the selecting language option, which is really odd since its never had an issue with past releases. No 9.10 for me.

I'd like to see em skip 10.04 and spend extra 6 months on QA + polish for 10.10. 10.04 as LTS to me does not bode well, and I think a LTS needs more QA + spit and polish than its getting.

Originally posted by Lysander:I've said this before, and I'll say it again:

I sometimes wish companies like Canonical would quit releasing precompiled binaries altogether, and only distribute their products as source code. I think this would solve a ton of the "problems" related to Ubuntu and other Linux distributions.

Unfortunately, that isn't exactly a feasible business model.

So, are you saying that we should all have to compile the entire system ourselves? I'm sorry, but if you do that you will lose most of your customers. IT departments won't be able to convince their bosses that they need to spend time compiling the OS and all the needed programs. And individual users?

I upgraded my laptop (a tablet) from 8.10 to 9.10, and am pretty well pleased.

I use a tablet PC and have been looking for a distro that gets the tablet experience right--allowing use of external monitor (I use different ones at home and work, with different resolutions), giving options on screen rotation, etc. (Note that Windows XP-TPC and Vista have done better than Linux, but also have some rough edges. I haven't tried Win7.) I was using SuSE for a while, but it was very inflexible and buggy, and simply did not allow me to change Xwindows configurations from what was detected at installation time.

With Ubuntu 8.04 I couldn't get extended desktop to work with both monitors (just one) and with 8.10 this did work, but required editing xorg.conf. With 9.10, using different external monitors works almost as well as it does on Windows (I still need to figure-out how to move the default panel position). Tablet support works only if I use the laptop monitor and don't rotate it. I still need to figure out how to configure this.

GTK+ 2.18 also introduces a new InfoBar widget, a strip that displays at the top of a window with some kind of passive notification message or prompt. This feature, which has been used in GNOME's Nautilus file manager and GEdit text editing application for quite some time, is now a proper part of the GTK+ toolkit and can be adopted pervasively throughout the desktop. It will reduce the need for intrusive popup message dialogs that interfere with workflow.

Originally posted by tutis:- VNC doesn't work with Compiz + Nvidia drivers; no screen refresh. I tried the No Machine solution but that didn't really do what I wanted as it spawned parallel sessions for a given user (not just remote screen view).

VNC works though? I am using x11vnc, add the "-noxdamage" parameter to have it work with things like compiz

Interesting comments. I have been very critical of Ubuntu in the past, but this release is the first that I have actually been impressed with. There are a few problems but this is the first release of Ubuntu that I'm running full-time since Gutsy. I really hope the next LTS is a polished, solid release that builds on Karmic's strengths.

The new default icon theme in Ubuntu 9.10 changes the look of the messaging indicator. It still uses an envelope as its icon, but the alternate image that is used when there is pending activity no longer has the star emblem that was used in Ubuntu 9.04. The envelope will merely change to a darker shade of brown. This is, unfortunately, much too subtle and almost impossible to notice unless you intentionally look for it at regular intervals.

The subtlety of the indicator status change defeats the purpose of the messaging indicator and makes it a hindrance rather than an improvement. It's particularly frustrating in conjunction with Empathy's refusal to pop open new message windows. I almost never realize it when I'm receiving new instant messages. This problem has been reported and discussed in the program's bug tracker on Launchpad. The developers feel strongly that the indicator should not have any attention-grabbing behavior.

There's a difference between "attention grabbing behavior" and "notification." I agree that "attention grabbing behavior" is all to frequently intrusive, but in this case changing the color of the indicator from 20% gray to 100% gray (a.k.a. black) would probably do the job effectively without being intrusive.

quote:

Another problem is that the indicator doesn't visually distinguish between different kinds of notifications. When the indicator icon has a pending message, it isn't possible to see when it is triggered by subsequent events. If I have unread e-mail in my inbox and I get up from my computer to get a soda, for example, I have to click the menu when I come back to see if I have any instant messages because I can't just tell at a glance. It would be helpful if there was a way to see how many pending items are in the indicator without having to open the menu.

Reminds me of this RGB LED notifier project I saw at hackaday.com. A netbook owner put the tricolor LED in the case to find out if he had IMs, emails, or Twitters. A similar software solution would probably work well for the notifier. Put a colored number there to indicate the message type and count. Sort of like this:Original image from DavidRGilson's Flickr photostream.

Tomboy gained Web sync capabilities earlier this year and introduced its own Web-based note management system called Snowy.

(2 paragraphs and image deleted)

Tomboy doesn't have support for merging different note versions or resolving collisions. During the sync process, it will check to see if each local note is different from the remote version. If so, it will ask the user if they want to overwrite the local note with the remote version or simply create a new copy so that both versions can be retained.